You're the biggest beneficiary of federal tax breaks

Data: More than 90 percent of expenditures go to individuals

8:14 PM,
Sep. 20, 2013

Written by

Gregory Korte
| USA Today

So-called "tax expenditures" - those deductions, credits, exclusions, loopholes and other goodies that clutter up the tax code - now amount to nearly $1.2 trillion a year, the government says.

But it's not all corporate tax giveaways and special-interest handouts: More than 90 percent of federal tax breaks go to individual taxpayers.

Since the government started accounting for tax preferences in 1974, the value of individual tax breaks has increased seven times faster than that of corporations, according to a USA Today analysis of tax expenditure data collected by the National ...